This disclosure relates generally to selecting content for presentation to a social networking system user, and more particularly to accounting for relevance of content to a social networking system user at a current time and at one or more future times when selecting content.
A social networking system allows users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the social networking system. Users create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The social networking system selects and presents content to a user to encourage the user to interact with the social networking system and with other users of the social networking system. For example, the social networking system generates a feed of content items for presentation to a user that includes content items describing actions performed by other users of the social networking system or content provided to the social networking system by other users of the social networking system.
When selecting content for presentation to a user, conventional social networking systems determine measures of relevance between various content items and the user. The measure of relevance between a user and a content item is typically based at least in part on the user's likelihood of interacting with the content item when the content item is presented. However, some content items may become irrelevant to a user at a certain time. Selecting content items based solely on their current relevance to a user may prevent a conventional social networking system from presenting certain content items to the user before a time when the content items are irrelevant to a user, which may reduce an amount of interaction between the user and the social networking system.